CMAT's Euro-Country.

The first time I heard Euro Country, I cried. Not quiet tears, but the kind that come when someone puts into words something you've felt your whole life but never knew how to say. It’s a song drenched in sadness, and a truth that’s rarely spoken aloud in Irish music. A truth that lives in the silence left behind by half-built estates, vanished pensions, and the pain we all inherited from a collapse we didn’t cause.

What she’s written isn’t just a song. It’s an unflinching, heartbroken letter to a country that sold its people's dreams it never intended to deliver. A song about survival when survival shouldn't have been the only option.

CMAT (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) from Meath is one of Ireland’s most important songwriters. Known for her theatrical performances and her fearless vulnerability, she’s carved out space for herself in a music world that often overlooks women who dare to feel too much. Euro Country is different. It’s  Sobering, Heavier, and it’s a reckoning.

The title track from her upcoming third album opens with a whisper of Irish, “Cad is gá dom a dhéanamh mura bhfuil mé ag bualadh leat?” (What am I supposed to do if I’m not meeting you?) It feels like a call into the void, to a friend, a country, a version of Ireland that never came back.

She sounds proud to be Irish, but that pride is stitched with pain. “I went away to come back, like a prodigal Christian,” she sings, nodding to our emigration cycles and our bruised, complicated ties to religion. Her voice trembles with both defiance and deep grief. She calls it her "Euro-Euro-Euro country” as if repeating it could make sense of what it’s become.

The Ireland she sings about isn’t the culturally rich island we like to sell abroad. It’s the one with half-built housing estates, the ones we drove past as kids and whispered about, the ghost towns left behind by the Celtic Tiger crash. It's the country where people “started killing themselves all around me,” where construction workers built homes no one could afford.

The 2008 financial crash left Ireland in ruins. The Celtic Tiger collapsed almost overnight, and with it went jobs, homes, and dignity. Over 300,000 people were unemployed by 2009, and emigration levels soared.

Euro-country doesn’t just remember that era. It grieves it.

This is what makes the song so devastating. For those of us who grew up in the shadow of the recession, Euro Country feels like both a funeral and a protest. It’s for the generation who were told to “move on.” It’s for the fathers who never recovered. The mothers who kept it all afloat. The empty promises. The lost time.

CMAT isn’t just documenting the past. She’s holding a mirror to the present. “The type of loss, pain, and lack of community that she feels we’re suffering from under modern capital isolation,” and it shows. Euro Country isn’t nostalgic. It’s a warning. As a country, we are not healed.

There are few artists bold enough to write songs like this. Her music reminds us that to grieve for a country is also to love it fiercely.

In a housing crisis that pushes young people out of their hometowns, the rising cost of living, people are struggling to stay afloat. CMAT isn’t writing about the past, she’s writing about right now, with such devastating clarity.

Because some of us never moved on.

Written by Sophie Lee.